"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
— John F. Kennedy

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
— Henry Ford

"One death is a tragedy, but one million deaths is a statistic."
— Stalin

"You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man."
— Barbara Ehrenreich

"When the well is dry, we know the worth of water."
— Benjamin Franklin

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Religion is like a knife: you can either use it to cut bread, or stick in someone's back.""
— Desmond Tutu

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."
— John Dewey

"Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
— Mary Oliver

"It is precisely because we resist the darkness in ourselves that we miss the depths of the loveliness, beauty, brilliance, creativity, and joy that lie at our core."
— Thomas Moore (Dark Nights of the Soul)

"Our tragedy in recent years springs from a leadership principally motivated by fear. Our Founding Fathers were a different breed. They acted on their faith, not their fear. They did not believe in fighting fire with fire; crime with crime; evil with evil; or delinquency by becoming delinquents. They set themselves against the terrors of a totalitarian state by structuring a government that would obey the law. They knew that the only way to escape a closed society was to accept the risk of living in an open one."
— Frank Church (Senator)

"The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty."
— James Madison

"To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude."
— Thomas Jefferson

"if a cluttered desk is that of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?"
— Albert Einstein

"This is your life and its ending one moment at a time."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?"
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said.
I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
Nobody would know it.
It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"He was just hungry, Papa. He's going to die.
He's going to die anyway.
He's so scared, Papa.
The man squatted and looked at him. I'm scared, he said. Do you understand? I'm scared.
The boy didn't answer. He just sat there with his head down, sobbing.
You're not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldn't understand him. What? He said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground."
— Cormac McCarthy

"They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow.
I didnt believe in that.
Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.
It didnt even know they were there."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)